Battle of the balconies

Chicago architects try to outdo one another on sky-high decks

May 16, 2010

The balcony has long presented an architectural conundrum: It's a great way to sell real estate, but an annoying appendage that mucks up a building's pristine geometry. Only a few architects, such as the late Bertrand Goldberg, the designer of Marina City's fabulous corncobs, have been able to make art of them.

But now, as the great building boom of the last dozen years comes to a close, a terrific cluster of eye-popping balconies is popping up on Chicago high-rises.

The balconies range from the undulating white terraces that have made the mixed-use Aqua tower the city's newest icon to the dot-dot-dash balconies, gray on a field of black, that bring zing to the 235 Van Buren condo high-rise that soars along Congress Parkway.

If you want to play Peter Pan, try the triangle-shaped balconies that are latched like hinges to the concrete side walls of the Dana Hotel & Spa at 660 N. State St. And then there are the glassed-in balconies that jut out from the soon-to-open, blue-tinted EnV tower at 161 W. Kinzie St., alongside the Merchandise Mart and the snaking Brown Line elevated tracks.

The designer of this apartment high-rise, Chicago architect Joe Valerio, jokes about a day in the future when an attractive young resident, not fully clothed, will step out onto one of the transparent balconies and cause a distracted CTA engineer to drive right past the Brown Line's Merchandise Mart station.

"As long as you're stuck with them," Valerio says of balconies, "you might as well use them architecturally." Without them, he accurately adds, Aqua, EnV and many other new high-rises would be nothing more than cereal boxes.

Welcome to "Balcony Wars," the game of design one-upmanship that has Chicago architects trying to outdo one another on the balcony front.

These balcony wars, it should be noted, are different from the battles that regularly erupt in condo associations over the proper rules for balcony use and decoration. At Marina City, for example, green carpeting has long been permitted on the floors of the famous semi-circular balconies. But decking is a no-no, as are other colors or materials that would render these masterpieces of 1960s modernism a visual patchwork.

"We're not looking for a rainbow," said David Gantt, who manages the tower for Chicago-based Draper and Kramer.

As the masterpieces and mediocrities left behind by the building boom make clear, not all balconies are created equal.

I would be a rich man if I had a dime for every red-brick Chicago warehouse that has been converted into apartments and marred by balconies strapped onto it. The black railings of these balconies usually resemble prison bars. Then there are the grotesque "mansions in the sky," like Lucien Lagrange's recently completed Elysian hotel and condo tower, where the dark metal balconies resemble hunks of black licorice jammed onto the side of a wedding cake.

The greatest sin in balcony design is to take a bad balcony and to multiply it endlessly. This is what happened at Grand Plaza, the twin-towered residential complex in River North, where long recessed balconies and grids of windows stretch gracelessly into the sky. The outcome recalls the infamous, shoebox-shaped housing blocks of former East Germany. Marina City is the reverse. Each of its balconies is a masterpiece of curvilinear concrete. Stack them on top of one another, and they only get more beautiful.

Whether they deliver eye candy or eyesores, balconies are a con in a cold-weather city like Chicago, seducing would-be buyers and renters with the promise of great weather, great views and more.

"I've always said that the subliminal thought that goes through the renter's mind is that the partner of his choice is sitting on the balcony with a martini and lounging on a lounge chair overlooking the setting sun," said Jim Loewenberg, who heads Chicago's Magellan Development Group, the developer for Aqua and many residential high-rises.

Invariably, though, the would-be love perches degenerate into eyesore outdoor storage spaces for grills and bikes. And there are other drawbacks — the housecats that fall to their deaths, the clueless dolts who drop cigarettes and beer bottles on passersby, the lawn chairs that fly off balconies when the wind blows hard and the occasional exhibitionist. Worst are the suicide jumps, like the one that may have occurred Wednesday at Marina City when, according to police, a 28-year-old man fell or jumped to his death from one of the towers and crashed into the roof of a white van parked below.

Despite such tragedies, the economic — and urban design — value of balconies is hard to dispute.

A rental apartment with a balcony will typically command 5 to 10 percent more than the same apartment without a balcony, Loewenberg said.